“Elizabeth Shilton is an enduring feminist … Her work is driven by her passion for advancing equality and equity for women, girls and marginalized people.” That’s how the YWCA Toronto describes Shilton, Senior Fellow with the Queen’s Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace (CLCW). The YWCA Toronto has named her its Law and Justice honoree among its Women of Distinction for 2016.

Among her many accomplishments cited by the organization, she has “fought tough cases during the early days of the Women’s Legal Education Action Fund (LEAF); argued before the Supreme Court to uphold the rape shield law; won a pay equity ruling worth many millions of dollars for low-paid women elementary teachers; defended the right of sexual assault survivors to keep their names out of the public eye; and fought to prevent the disclosure of counselling records of sexual abuse survivors.”

Before she became an academic and joined the CLCW, Shilton practised for many years as a union-side labour lawyer and co-founded the firm Cavalluzzo Shilton McIntyre Cornish LLP. “Equality issues were very much part of that practice from the outset,” she says. “Among my clients were unions working in what were then considered ‘women’s professions,’ such as teaching. In those professions, collective bargaining issues overlapped frequently with issues of gender discrimination. It quickly became clear that economic security for women was very intimately tied to equality issues.”

After leaving private practice, Shilton completed a doctoral degree and then joined the CLCW in 2010. She is also an adjunct professor at Queen’s Law, where she teaches Advanced Labour Law, focusing on human rights in the unionized workplace.

Her own legal education – an LLM from Harvard and an SJD from the University of Toronto – highlighted the importance of getting real world experience while in school. “I worked on my first discrimination case while I was a law student, and learned an enormous amount about the ‘nuts and bolts,’ like how courts and tribunals work, how to gather and prepare evidence,” she says. “I also learned how to deal with losing – an important lesson for social justice lawyers.”

Her current research interests at the CLCW focus on domestic and comparative employment pension policy and related issues of economic security. “Equality issues are very much at the core of law in the contemporary workplace. The Centre has been a very congenial place for me to pursue my research interests in retirement income policy and its intersection with equality issues, as well as organizing conferences and workshops on human rights issues.”

For Shilton, who has also rejoined LEAF and is participating in the Prince Edward Island reproductive rights challenge, law has always been indispensable in pursuing social change. “Law is a critically important tool in the on-going struggle for social justice both nationally and internationally,” she says. On May 26 in Toronto, she will receive her award at the 36th annual Women of Distinction Gala.